Wayne Shorter

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Wayne Shorter is generally acknowledged to be jazz's greatest living composer.

Born August 25, 1933, in Newark, Mr. Shorter celebrated his 75th birthday with a concert at Carnegie Hall in December 2008. The Shorter Quartet, formed in 2000, includes the pianist Danilo Perez, the bassist John Patitucci, the drummer Brian Blade and Mr. Shorter on tenor and soprano saxophones. In the course of the concert, they kept melodies obscured through harmony that was constantly flowing, and they allowed breathing room for everyone, almost rendering obsolete the old notions of jazz architecture — solos, backgrounds, vamps and bridges.

Mr. Shorter's mastery is in knocking down the wall between jazz and classical. His music not only makes references to the Miles Davis Quintet of the mid-1960s, of which Mr. Shorter was a member, but also shows the stylistic influences of John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. Then, too, he helped create jazz/fusion, founding Weather Report with Joe Zawinul in 1970.

His roots in the music can be traced to the night in the late '40s when Mr. Shorter first heard Thelonious Monk and Charlie Parker on the radio. He cut classes to listen to musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, eventually learning to play a used clarinet and starting his own band. The saxophonist Sonny Stitt offered him a job as sideman, but he declined because he had not yet finished high school.

To the music teachers at New York University, he was the student with the temerity to blend classical music with jazz. (He earned his B.A. in 1956.)

Mr. Shorter has performed with legendary jazzmen, from the pianist Horace Silver to the bandleader Maynard Ferguson. The trumpeter Lee Morgan invited him to join Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers. During his tenure with the group, Mr. Shorter wrote "Lester Left Town," "Children of the Night" and "This Is for Albert," dedicated to the pianist Bud Powell. In 1964, he left the Messengers and joined the Davis quintet. Miles Davis would later describe Mr. Shorter as being the group's "intellectual musical catalyst."

Mr. Shorter's daughter died at 14 of a grand mal seizure in 1986. His wife, Ana Maria Shorter, and niece, Dalila Lucien, were among the passengers killed in the T.W.A. Flight 800 explosion off Long Island, N.Y., in 1996.

In a 1998 Times interview, he talked about the loss of his wife. ''There's a drive here,'' he said, pointing to his chest, ''and it's coming from her. When someone very close to you dies, a lot of people might cut off what they're doing or commit suicide or whatever. But eventually you start to listen to every fiber of life. The eternity of life is revealed, and you're celebrating it through music rather than using your own life to celebrate music. My life is not music.'' Then he quoted something Mr. Davis once said: ''I am not what I do, I do what I am.''

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